Are We a Team?

Hi. My name is Jenny McConnell. I am the newly appointed CIO of a medium-sized technology company. Our company recruits top graduates from schools of business and engineering. Talent, intellect, creativity—it’s all there. If you lined up this crowd for a group photo, credentials in hand, the “wow” factor would be there.

Our company is spread over a dozen states, mostly in the Northwest. The talent pool is amazing across the board, both in information technology (IT) and the rest of the company. But when the CEO hired me, he said that we are performing nowhere near our potential. On the surface, the company is doing fine. But we should be a Fortune 500 organization. With this much talent, we should be growing at a much faster rate. The CEO also said that I was inheriting “a super team with disappointing performance.” His task for me was to pull the IT stars into a cohesive team that would meet company needs for new IT systems and services much faster and more effectively.

Without making our superstars feel that they were being critiqued and second-guessed, or indicating “there’s a real problem here,” I wanted to gather as much information and feedback as possible from the 14 team members (regional CIOs and department heads) who report to me. I held one-on-one meetings in order to give a voice to each person, allowing each individual to provide an honest assessment of the team as well as areas for improvement and a vision for the future of team efforts.

I was surprised by the consistency of remarks and opinions. For example, a picture emerged of the previous CIO, who was obviously awed by the talent level of team members. Comments such as, “Bob pretty much let us do what we wanted,” and “Bob would start the meeting and then just fade into the background, as if he found us intimidating” were typical. The most disturbing comment, “Bob always agreed with me,” was expressed by most of the team members at some point in our conversation. It was as if the regional heads...